I ran three games at Enfilade and managed to get pictures of two. Dopey me.
First, I ran our annual Enfilade Cup game. That's a game of Thunderboats played with standard rules. It's nice because anybody who has one can bring their own boat and play with it. It's always entertaining because it's always no holds barred. I always find myself laughing. In this year's Cup, Al Rivers brought his boat in University of West Virginia colors, and Doug Hamm brought a magnificently painted, if somewhat bereft of a tail fin Hamm's Beer boat. Doug also provided the real entertainment by purchasing a nitrous bottle and spectacularly setting himself on fire. One simply cannot have too much fun. Shawn McEvoy who casts our miniatures and I are watching the proceedings. I'm the guy in the Tacoma Rainiers hat.
Saturday night was The Alcalde's Daughter, my adventure in Mexico with Sword and the Flame. I've explained the game before, but Enfilade is great because it always attracts a different crowd. I immediately recruited Tim Weber and Mark Fortner to the game for comedy relief. They've played in almost all my Maxmillian games and usually leave me in hysterics with their fractured logic and bad Spanish accents.
As I mentioned in my March post, I did make changes to the victory conditions, but the French continued to pick on the poor Mexicans. The town was a bit closer to the French side of the board, though the Mexican types outnumbered them. The guerrillas did manage to inflict some casualties, but nothing catastrophic. It was fun and everyone had a good time, which is the most important thing.
Just as an aside, Phil Williams gave me a wonderful little campaign guide to Maxmillian's war that hope to use in the not too distant future. It uses smaller units for TSATF and since I have tons of extra command figures I shouldn't have much difficulty. I am short cavalry, and don't have Austrians, Belgians or Egyptians, so either I'll have to figure something out or just lump it for now.
My last game was the 1965 Gold Cup race. This was what I was most interested in running. It tweaks our Thunderboat rules and applies historical factors and conditions to the racing. Daveshoe and I had six great guys with boats including first-timer John Westra. We raced five heats, with some predictable tension. Chris Rivers seemed to be a natural, overcoming some real adversity in the game to place consistently in the top three. The fun moment was Al Rivers in Exide pushing the nitrous button, getting a die roll of 22, bursting into flame, but putting it out when his engine stalled with a wash of lake water on an event card draw. All that was missing was becoming airborne.
On the last heat three players had a real shot at winning, Chris, John, and Norris Hazelton. Chris was leading by a hundred points at the beginning of the race, and though he finished third, he still won the race on points easily. The game went six hours, and we didn't take breaks. I was concerned about the length of the race, but when I asked players they thought it was fine. Good news, because I loved it.
On the pics-At the top of the page, Al's Exide leads the parade. Exide had some great moments, but a couple of heats in which Al's boat DNF'ed kept him out of the money. The white boat is Notre Dame, a great boat with a great driver, that Norris rode to victory in at least one heat. It's holding its own against Savair's Mist,the dark boat that was not very good with a mediocre driver. Lots of driver re-rolls that a couple of players made good use of. The bottom boat is just a good look at Exide, Miss Madison and Gale's Roostertail coming down the backstretch. Gale's Roostertail is perhaps my prettiest boat, and I nearly entered her in the painting competition.
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